Oracle Blog

Lynn Rohrer's Weblog

Tuesday Apr 29, 2008

Today Sun is providing a view into the heart of our storage strategy -- Open Storage -- the combination of open source storage software and industry standard hardware that delivers cost effective, open solutions for a new generation of storage challenges.

The team I hang out with spent the last year delivering on Sun's April 10, 2007 commitment to open source our Solaris-based storage software. It's been an exciting year... partly because of the open source contributions we've seen from our storage vendor friends, QLogic, Emulex, and Hitachi Data Systems, as well as the community members like Digitar and Joyent who have put the OpenSolaris storage capabilities into action in their datacenters.

Over the past couple of weeks we have had the good fortune to chat with some of our other OpenSolaris Storage community members and I'd like to share these interviews with you to provide a community perspective on Open Storage.

The first interview is with Evan Powell, CEO for Nexenta. I'm impressed with the work that these folks have done to deliver unique value on top of the OpenSolaris code base and create their NexentaStor software-based NAS and iSCSI solution. I particularly like this quote..."Sure... OpenSolaris is open and that may raise some concerns among certain buyers but what is really riskier? Supporting open standards including open access to your data so you can own your data... or continue to pay ever-increasing sums to legacy [storage] vendors."

The second interview is with Greg Perry, CEO for LiveAmmo. LiveAmmo is a leading provider of instructor-led training classes and products, with
a specific focus on enterprise storage, infrastructure, and virtualization technologies. "We put [students] through the paces of converting a physical machine into a virtual machine and illustrate things like clustering, high availability and workload balancing [with] all the bells and whistles that to with enterprise virtualization. All of that is predicated on an enterprise storage container... and until we ran into Sun it was just not cost effective. If we wanted to run 100 simultaneous classes with 10-15 students in each class that's a significant workload -- quite a bit of bandwidth [with] 100s or 1000s of virtual machines working simultaneously. Cost per GB to get from point A to point B [in] our datacenter model was not something we could make work until we found a commodity-based storage approach that was not based on a proprietary hardware set and proprietary SAN device. "Necessity is the mother of invention". Over time it evolved into a much more cost-effective platform based largely on OpenSolaris."

I don't know that I could say it any better. Real people, Real Open Storage solutions.